On 27 Oct 2008, at 07:48, David Boyes wrote:
* Transparancy
The processes and procedures used to make decisions and select
goals and
leaders should be clearly documented and applied, and it should be
easily determined how decisions are arrived at and the decisions each
participant made.
From my reading, it seems like the proposal already addresses issues
of transparency. Do you have specific areas in which you have concerns?
* Sustainability
Any organization that is going to survive beyond the first generation
needs a clear development plan and a succession plan to ensure that
leadership is available and understands the tasks and steps to run the
organization.
The current documents do a fair job with the first principle of
conservatorship, but I don't see much work on the other two yet.
Perhaps
the idea is to develop the processes as things progress, but there are
good working examples of similar organizations that would probably
prove
to be valuable examples if used as a starting point.
I'm also concerned that there is little discussion of the
sustainability
principle. How does one become part of the various organizations or
committees described in the proposed documents?
It's not clear to me how one becomes a board member, beyond the
normal corporate election structures. Criteria for becoming a
gatekeeper (appointment by the TAC), or a TAC member (appointment, in
the case of corporate members, or election for individual members)
seem pretty clear.
How long can one obtain
as a gatekeeper or board member? Is there a term limit (a desirable
thing, IMHO, as it forces an organization to develop new leaders
rather
than having the same faces in the same places)?
In this case, as with AFS standardisation, I strongly disagree that
term limits are desirable. At their worst, they just ensure the
retirement of strong post holders, and their replacement with
inexperienced ones.
OpenAFS badly needs a way of encouraging new faces, and growing those
individuals into positions of responsibility. I don't believe that
requiring the abdication of successful leaders after some arbitrary
period will help with this. It's kind of like cutting off the head of
a random animal in the hope that it will grow a new one - it works in
a small number of cases, but the rest of the time you'll end up with
a lifeless corpse.
Cheers,
Simon.
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